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In Istanbul’s Taksim Square

Spend a night in Istanbul’s Taksim
Square, and it becomes very clear why protesters are there. They feel that the
government ignores them, overlooks them and excludes them. They say their
voices are not heard, and that the government serves its own constituency,
telling everyone else how to live and what not to say.

The protests that have rocked
Turkey in recent days started with a sit-in at Taksim Gezi Park to challenge government
plans to build a shopping mall in one of Istanbul’s few green spaces. But they
have grown into much wider discontent and have become demonstrations against
the ruling Justice and Development Party.

On June 2 the interior minister
reported that there had been 235 protests in 67 of Turkey’s 81 provinces. Hundreds
have been wounded or treated for exposure to tear gas, and on June 3,
23-year-old Abdullah Comert died of head injuries during a protest in the city
of Antakya.

What will stay with me is the
atmosphere among the many thousands filling the square and park on a Monday
night, one week after the sit-it by the first campaigners began. The spirit of
solidarity and carnival was thrilling.

From streets nearby came the fog
of teargas that the police are still using in generous quantities. It has become
de rigueur for thousands of
demonstrators to walk nonchalantly around in medical-type masks as if about to
step into an operating theatre, carrying in hand a bottle containing a mixture
of water and anti-acid drugs or even milk, applied to the face to neutralize
the symptoms of the gas. Some of the most original graffiti - and there is much of it - plays with
the teargas theme: “Wipe away your tears: things will never be the same
again!”

High barricades have been put up
to prevent vehicles from entering the square, and a few police cars rolled over
with their windows smashed stand as monuments to protest.

The protesters clearly encompass
a much wider spectrum of the society than those campaigning against a construction
project billed as urban regeneration and strongly associated with its main
architect, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Most seem to be drawn from the
Turkish secular-leaning middle classes, students or people in their 20s and 30s.
For the most part, these are not people who have spent much time at protests.

There are also some radical
leftist protesters and radical nationalist and secularist-Kemalist groups, who
invoke the legacy of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The large
number of Turkish flags on show during the day seemed to be less in evidence at
night. From time to time there has been a smaller group of Kurdish Peace and
Democracy Party (DTP) supporters, hoping the protests won’t derail the peace
process. And there are people calling themselves “Anticapitalist Muslims” and
“Radical Muslims,” and strong participation from activists in the gay rights movement.

In short, it is hardly a uniform
group, but they are united in political opposition to the government.

“We are fed up with the way we
are treated by Tayyip [the prime minister] and the police”, one newly arrived
high school kid said, summing up the mood.

Violent and repeated police
attacks on the peaceful protesters in the park that began at five in the
morning on May 30 undoubtedly provided the visual trigger for pent-up anger
against the authorities. The government does not like public displays of
protest. It has for years used heavy-handed tactics to delegitimize
demonstrations by those it perceives as opponents, mostly Kurds and leftists,
trade unionists and students.

Few police have been held to
account for their brutality during these bouts of repression, and police
violence encourages a minority of demonstrators to fight back and resort to
violence themselves. In March 2006, the police killed ten people in three days
of protests that rocked the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

The European Court of Human
Rights has weighed in against these tactics repeatedly over the years, most
recently in December 2012. It ruled that Turkey had violated the right to
assembly in a crushing verdict on policing in Istanbul on May 1, 2008 (DISK and
KESK v. Turkey). Unfortunately, Turkey has not changed its tactics in response
to these rulings. Add to this picture a pattern of prosecutions of critical
speech and writings in violation of repeated judgments of the European Court.

It has been highly regrettable
that the prime minister has fuelled the perception that the government is not
interested in reaching out to all of Turkey, apparently turning a deaf ear to
the protesters. He has said that the Taksim construction project will go ahead,
that demonstrators are “hooligans,” that democracy is secured by the vote at
the ballot box, and that you get your chance every few years. The prime
minister has even referred obliquely to local and foreign provocateurs being
behind the protests and called social media a “curse”. The mainstream liberal
daily newspaper Radikal reported on
June 6 that police had detained several people on suspicion of “inciting
criminal activities” with their tweets.

The deputy prime minister Bülent
Arinç and President Abdullah Gül have taken a more conciliatory line. Prime
Minster Erdoğan returns
from his north Africa visit on Thursday
night. Will he too change his tone? The government response to the protest in
the days ahead will be a key test of whether the ruling party can contribute to
making Turkey a democratic and rights-respecting country. And it will test the
government’s ability to dispense with the top-down authoritarian political
tradition its political class inherited.

Taksim is not Tahrir, but transition
to democracy in Turkey has to mean more than a vote in an election.